Monday, November 22, 2010

MOBY-DICK, Page 451

Title: For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world...

8.5 inches by 11 inchesacrylic paint and ink on found paperNovember 16, 2010

2 comments:

Titus, both this piece and the one above were painted on the same evening. What looks like scorch marks are actually the results of a happy accident. I wanted the paper for these to look rather old, stained and slightly textured so I watered down some brown ink and painted several layers on each page. Then I shifted the pages, letting the ink run and pool before drying. I set them both in front of the fan to dry, but even after an hour the deeper pools of ink had not yet dried. I really needed to get started on painting the carpenter though, so I took them into the studio and decided to blot up the pools of ink with paper towels. They were slightly gummy though, and after blotting, I ended up with what looked like scorch marks. Which I thought added perfectly to the texture of the paper and the visual idea of this rough-hewn carpenter, so I left them as is and got started on the rest.

Some of the best pieces in this project have been the result of accidents in the studio, which has been a strange thing to experience since I am usually fairly precise, deliberate, and tightly controlled when I draw.